"The future will prevail."

Excellent article about what really makes the United States unique and what should give us hope for the future.  The Trump years are not about the future, they are about recreating the worst of the past.

We must understand that what we've been living through is backlash. Backlash. It's not the engine of history. It is the revolt against the engine of history. Then we might remember — just to pat ourselves on the back for a second — that what we are actually endeavoring to do right now is to become a kind of society that has seldom, if ever, existed in history. Which is become a majority-minority, democratic superpower.

Trump and his MAGA mob are fighting to restore the past.  America has always been in the future, not locking into the past.  The victory of the country that our founders and every great leader of this country has fought for is not inevitable, but it is possible.  We can't despair.  We can work for the future.

Funny, He Doesn't Look Like A Terrorist

 
This guy is trying to sell you pillows and he's selling Trump on declaring martial law so that he can stay in power.  Even today, when the outline of Trump  insurrection is being filled in with acts of violence and evidence of a seditious conspiracy, MyPillow guy is pushing for a violent overthrow of the Constitutional government of the United States.

MyPillow CEO Michael Lindell brought notes with him to a meeting in the West Wing Friday that zoomed-in photographs appear to show contained the phrases “martial law,” “Insurrection Act” and “foreign interference in the election.” 

The paper also included a line reading “move Kash Patel to CIA Acting,” a seeming suggestion for President Donald Trump to fire CIA Director Gina Haspel and move Patel, a Trump loyalist recently installed at the Pentagon amid a purge of senior civilian officials, to fill the role. 

I would avoid putting your head on a MyPillow unless you approve of treason. 

Trump Suppressed Information Regarding His Fascist Allies

For four years, Trump and his enablers systematically dismantled the machinery of government responsible for investigating and assessing the threat to our country posed by domestic terrorists.  In particular, workers in agencies involved in monitoring and reporting on the threat posed by white supremacists or neo-fascist organizations were left with a clear understanding that none of the MAGA embeds in the various government agencies responsible for public safety were interested in the  dealing with that threat.

Across conversations with multiple former DHS officials and analysts, TPM found that a top-down aversion from the Trump administration towards addressing the threat of far-right extremism, inept management, and the dismantling of DHS bureaucracies aimed at coordinating, analyzing, and disseminating information about extremist groups contributed to the lack of warning.

Trump considered these groups to be allies and treated them as such.  Reduced emphasis on these violent groups themselves and an institutional unwillingness to provide warning of potential dangers particularly when those dangerous activities coincided with Trump and MAGA goals.

Terrorist Threat to Washington, DC

The real terrorist threat to our nation is Trump and the Republican Party.  They are one and the same.  

For the inauguration, there will be at least four times as many National Guardsmen in the US capital as troops in all of Afghanistan. Where is the greatest terror threat to the US today?

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) January 12, 2021

“You shall have no other gods before me." - Who Said That?

 

There isn't much evidence that Sinclair Lewis said or wrote that "when Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."   Whether Lewis is the author or not, the statement itself is tragically prescient.

Evangelical white Christians have been a core constituency of the Republican Party for decades.  But, today their fidelity to the Republican Party has been eclipsed by their near worship of Trump himself.  Trump seems an unlikely vessel for such adulation, but despite his obvious lack of faith and his long history of serial violations of a large number of Commandments, faith in Trump has become a cult like obsession among many evangelicals.  

Some of the insurrectionist that pillaged and defiled the United State Capitol last Wednesday carried the banners of both Jesus and Trump.  Some of them were likely also participants in the Jericho March, a series of marches on state capitols that culminated in Washington last Wednesday as the MAGA mob  attacked our country. 

...“Shout if you love Jesus!” someone yelled, and the crowd cheered. “Shout if you love Trump!” The crowd cheered louder. The group’s name is drawn from the biblical story of Jericho, “a city of false gods and corruption,” the march’s website says. Just as God instructed Joshua to march around Jericho seven times with priests blowing trumpets, Christians gathered in D.C., blowing shofars, the ram’s horn typically used in Jewish worship, to banish the “darkness of election fraud” and ensure that “the walls of corruption crumble.”

The founders of the Jericho March include Robert Weaver, who was selected by Trump to head the Indian Health Services.  Weaver withdrew from consideration when serious questions arose regarding the veracity of his resume and multiple financial improprieties.  Arina Grossu co-founded the Jericho March movement with Weaver.  She is a prominent voice in the Family Research Council, a right wing Christian organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  She has been outspoken in her belief that Trump won the 2020 election, parroting Trump and his lawyers' lies in multiple interviews.  Considering its singular purpose, it could be said that the Jericho March is basically a right wing astroturf operation designed to promote Trump's "stolen election" fiction by wrapping a Trump flag around the cross and calling it a religious crusade.  

The Jericho March is evidence that Donald Trump has bent elements of American Christianity to his will, and that many Christians have obligingly remade their faith in his image. Defiant masses literally broke down the walls of government, some believing they were marching under Jesus’s banner to implement God’s will to keep Trump in the White House. 

What is difficult and painful for many Americans of faith is the extent to which a large segment of Christians have been lead to believe that Trump's Christianity is somehow greater than the faith of the country's voters, election official and elected representatives.  If Trump says something that is verifiably false these followers of Christ are compelled to say that his statement is true and that anyone who doesn't believe Trump has failed to do God's bidding.  

On Wednesday, the Jericho March account tweeted a screenshot of Trump condemning Vice President Mike Pence for not stopping the certification of the Electoral College votes. “A sad day in America,” it said, along with prayer-hands emojis. The march organizers were not mourning the attack on the Capitol. They were mourning the vice president’s refusal to help the president overturn the election.

NOTE: Don't expect to find any information about the Washington march or future Jericho Marches on the groups website. It has been stripped down to a single statement decrying Wednesday violence and ends by asking: "May God bring peace and unity across the United States of America."  And, don't expect to find the Tweet referenced above, it is no longer available. 

Bill Says No to Trump

Football's New England Patriots head coach, Bill Belichick, will not accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump.  Belichick has been a Trump friend and supporter even prior to Trump's 2016 election.   The White House only announced the planned award to Belichick on Sunday in an apparent bid to give Trump a photo opportunity with the successful coach this Wednesday.  

"Recently I was offered the opportunity to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which I was flattered by out of respect for what the honor represents and admiration for prior recipients. Subsequently, the tragic events of last week occurred and the decision has been made not to move forward with the award.

 "Above all, I am an American citizen with great reverence for our nation's values, freedom and democracy. I know I also represent my family and the New England Patriots team. One of the most rewarding things in my professional career took place in 2020 when, through the great leadership within our team, conversations about social justice, equality and human rights moved to the forefront and became actions.

I wonder if Trump's other football pal, former Patriot quarterback, Tom Brady, will still be playing golf with Trump after his season ends? 

They're All In On This Sedition

Virtually the entire Republican Party and its vast machine of right wing media megaphones are directly responsible for last week's insurrection against the United States government.  The attack on the United States Capitol and our democracy was the direct result of a corrupt lying president and the willingness of members of his political party to repeat those lies and while ignoring the damage Trump was doing to our country.

...Plenty of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol complex on Wednesday really, truly believed that Trump had been cheated out of four more years; that Vice President Mike Pence had unilateral power to revise the election results; that their takeover of the building could change the course of history... But the point remains: They were conned into coming to D.C. in the first place, not just by Trump with his compulsive lying, but by the legions of Republicans who refused to counter those lies, believing it couldn’t hurt to humor the president and stoke the fires of his base.

Republican leaders at every level took up Trump's "stolen election" lie and amplified it giving it credence and encouraging every one of the 73 million people who voted for Trump to violence.

Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who once skewered Trump’s dishonesty, promised “earth-shattering” evidence to support his former rival’s claims of a rigged election. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted that “President Trump won this election,” told of a plot to cheat him and alerted the viewers watching him on Fox News, “We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who famously called Trump “a pathological liar,” himself lied so frequently and so shamelessly it became difficult to keep up. Dozens of other congressional Republicans leveled sweeping, unsubstantiated allegations of mass voter fraud, some of them promoting the #stopthesteal campaign online.

The entire mechanism of the Republican Party joined in the deception, the lies, the wild far out theories.  The party itself attacked honest Republican at the state level for doing their jobs correctly. 

From party headquarters, the Republican National Committee’s chairwoman flung reckless insinuations left and right as her top staffers peddled a catalogue of factually inaccurate claims. The two Republican senators from Georgia, desperate to keep in Trump’s good graces ahead of their runoff elections, demanded the resignation of the Republican secretary of state for no reason other than the president’s broad assertions of corruption, none of which stood up to multiple recounts and investigations by GOP officials statewide. Local lawmakers in states like Michigan and Wisconsin told Republicans they’d been cheated, citing the suspicious late-night counting of mail ballots, when they were the ones who had refused to allow those ballots to be counted earlier, never mind the fact that Trump’s lawsuits were being laughed out of one courtroom after another.

No lies was excluded, no matter how bizarre and irresponsible.  In fact it almost seems that Republicans, Trump's lawyers and the right wing noise machine were in competition to see who could get the MAGA mob to believe the most outlandish and ridiculous lies.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich floated the arrest of election workers. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host, urged Republican-controlled legislatures to ignore the results of their state elections and send pro-Trump slates to the Electoral College. Right-wing propaganda outlets like The Federalist and One America News churned out deceptive content framing the election as inherently and obviously corrupt. The RNC hosted disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell for a sanctioned news conference that bordered on clinically insane, parts of which were tweeted by the @GOP account. The president’s lawyers and surrogates screamed about hacked voting machines and international treachery and Biden-logoed vans full of ballots. 

Trump is just the tip of the iceberg.  The entire Republican Party is corrupt.